Contributor Faith Salie asks: Has bad grammar in music ever driven you crazy?

Friday, February 15, 2013 - 12:00 AM

We each have songs that, to our particular ear, sound like nails on a chalkboard. And some songs should be deconstructed on a chalkboard…for bad grammar. I’m not talking about slang, colloquialisms, or innovative language. I’m not being punctilious about making sure you don’t end a lyric line with a preposition. In fact, the first dance song at my wedding reception was “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To.” I think it would have lost a little something if it were “To You It’d Be So Nice To Come Home.” Nobody wants to sound sort of like Yoda.

What I’m talking about is crappy syntax. Artistic license is one thing, language mangling is another. Bad grammar is jarring; it takes me out of the flow of the song.

Here’s how I define unnecessarily bad grammar in a song: when it wouldn’t change the rhyme scheme to use the correct word or when the syntax results from being lyrically lazy.

Like this, from the Paula Cole song “I Don’t Wanna Wait”:

"So open up your morning light / And say a little prayer for I"

That lyric makes me say a prayer for the objective case.

Bryan Adams also pulls one of these in “Run To You”:

"She says her love for me could never die / But that'd change if she ever found out about you and I"

Or maybe he’s just speaking Canadian.

I’m not a lyricist, but I am a writer. If there’s a sentence I’m composing that bends the laws of language or just doesn’t sound right, I rewrite it until it does. Sometimes that means scrapping it entirely and expressing myself differently. In the case of musicians like the ones above, I’d prescribe a little more creative diligence rather than copping out by using the easy (and egregiously incorrect) rhyme of “I.”

Here are a few more:

“Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton

We all remember the 6th grade lesson about “lay” vs. “lie.”

“Rich Girl” by Gwen Stefani:

"If I was rich girl (na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na nah) / See, I'd have all the money in the world, if I was a wealthy girl"

If she were a rich girl, she might buy a tutorial in subjunctive.

On the other hand, Beyoncé gets big credit for using the subjunctive in "If I Were a Boy."

And then there’s…

“Play Me” by Neil Diamond:

"Songs she sang to me, Songs she brang to me"

Of course this is from the man who brought us these lyrics, which are grammatically sound, but accidentally hilarious:

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She’s also a panelist on the BBC America series, “Would You Rather…?” with Graham Norton. She was the host of Bravo’s The Approval Matrix and of the Planet Green series Treehugger TV. She’s appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The O’Reilly Factor, Anderson, CNN, HLN, Bravo, VH1, and she’s written for Slate.com, O, The Oprah Magazine, and CNN.com. She hosted PRI's Fair Game with Faith Salie for its 300-episode run.

She’s probably the only Rhodes scholar who does stand-up comedy. Faith is on a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine collectable trading card that is worth hundreds of cents.

I hear relatively innocuous complaints like the use of split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition. Want a reality check on what's really egregious? Try listening to Keith Murray, "The Most Beautifullest Thing in this World".

Thank goodness I'm not the only one who is troubled by poor grammar in popular music! First of all, Bob Dylan's "Lay, Lady Lay" continues with "Lay across one big brass bed." It should be "lie." This error is the most common in all popular music. The 2006 song by Snow Patrol called "Chasing Cars" gets it wrong only half the time "If I just lay here, would you lie with me..." And the ever popular Maroon 5's song "Through With You" offers up "As you lay in bed." Gosh, is it really so hard for them to get this little word right?

The Doors:"I'm gonna love you / 'til the stars fall from the sky / for you and I". Fingernails on a chalkboard! How many times have I endured this on the radio? Recently I heard somewhere that Jim Morrison thought some of his own songs were really stupid, and that he couldn't bear to play them live. I think this is a strong candidate for that category. "Stronger than dirt!"

The King of trying-hard-but-not-getting-it-right is the perversely sublime autodidact Morrissey. He sang to us of "Cemetry" gates, and he asked a compelling rhetorical question; "Why pamper life's complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?" Why? Why not ponder them instead? Die-hard fans insist he meant what he said, but I'm one who still cringes, every time I hear the lyric. Around the same time, very early on in his career, in an interview he said something about how great it would be to go down in "the annals of history." But he gave the word "annals" a strangely saucy pronunciation... one wonders if the error was intententional, but it probably wasn't.